I looked out at the rain-washed pavement as we trundled out for school and thought how empty streets looked in the rain. We could have been the only people in the world. I suddenly felt melancholy. I thought it was probably because no matter how exciting the weekend had been, that was basically that.
As if we had made some sort of agreement, none of us mentioned Da’s gig at school. The funny thing was that I heard a couple of kids at the lockers talking about Urban Dingo being upstaged by a local band. That drove away the glum feeling that had come over me in the morning, and I started wondering how it would be for our family if Da’s band actually started getting regular work. Maybe even a recording contract.
It was hard to imagine Da being famous, though, because like Jesse had said, Da didn’t care about fame. He thought it was stupid to care if a lot of people knew your name and face. But maybe I was wrong about Da not wanting that kind of success, because over the past few weeks my abilities had shown me something about him I hadn’t known before: Da worried a lot about money, no matter what he said about it being good for us to live on the edge. Whenever he got a bill in the mail, he gave off the ammonia smell, and sometimes he smelled of it when he was talking about not having a gig for a few days.
Gilly hadn’t arrived by roll call, and I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to telling her about Da’s triumph. But she turned up halfway through third period and explained to Mr. Rackett that she had been to the dentist. He grunted in disbelief and told her to sit.
“How come teachers always act like everything you tell them is a lie?” she whispered as she slid into the chair next to me.
“They think everyone is trying to put something over on them,” I said, opening myself to her gentle sea smell.
Mr. Rackett shot us a look, so we fell silent. After a while he turned to fiddle with the computer so he could show us more historical documents, and Gilly said softly, “I’ve heard a rumor about you.”
“What did you hear?” I whispered, stepping up my number screen slightly.
She leaned closer. “I heard that you can read people’s minds.”
“OK, I confess. Who told you?”
“Can’t you read my mind to find out?” she asked. Then she burst into soft laughter. I laughed, too, mostly out of relief that she had been joking. “But seriously,” she said, “Sylvia told me you’re possessed by a witch and that you’re trying to find other people for your witch friends to take over.”
“Great,” I said dryly. “What comes next? Witch burnings?”
Gilly shrugged. “It’s just that everyone’s noticed how you’ve changed since … well, you know.”
I sighed and tried to look as though my heart was not doing a war dance. “Being asleep for a month kind of alters your perspective.”
“I can imagine,” Gilly murmured. Mr. Rackett was cursing, which meant that any minute he would lose his temper and go stomping off to shout at someone in the audiovisual department. He had been warring with the A/V people all year. He thought they deliberately gave him the worst equipment. The truth is he’s just one of those people who can’t deal with technology. Once, when I was passing the staff room, I heard him shouting at the coffeemaker.
I realized that Gilly was still looking at me, so I said, “I don’t think about being in a coma until someone mentions something that happened before the accident, then I remember I was asleep for a month.” I kept my voice low because it was a bad move to give Mr. Rackett a human target for his anti-technology frenzy. “It feels … I don’t know …” I stopped, realizing that I still hadn’t completely come to terms with the lost month. Maybe because a sleep that deep was a little too like being dead for a while.
“When it first happened, they announced it in school,” Gilly said. “Everyone thought you’d be back in a day or so. Only it went on and on, and someone said you were on some sort of life-support system.”
We didn’t say anything for a while, then Gilly asked if I wanted to do something outside of school sometime. I grinned and asked if she wasn’t scared I would drag her off to be possessed by one of my witch buddies, and she said she’d take the risk. Then Mr. Rackett lost it, but instead of stomping out as usual, he told us he would hand out photocopies next class. Maybe he had started therapy or something.
He began talking about the American Civil War, and I let myself focus on the way the sun was lighting up some motes of dust in front of my chair.
“You can borrow my notes,” Gilly said dryly, after the bell rang. I blinked at her stupidly. “For the Civil War questionnaire. You didn’t take any.”
“Oh. I … I have a good memory,” I said.
“But you didn’t even listen,” Gilly objected.
“A little bit of me was listening,” I told her.
* * *
On my way down the hall to the last class of the day, I caught sight of Harlen coming out of the front office. He looked taller and more handsome than ever, with his hair shining dark as the pelt of a mink and his slow, delicious curve of a smile directed at the principal. If he had been sick, he looked perfectly, wonderfully healthy now.
The principal went back into the office, and Harlen turned to speak to a beautiful, stylish woman wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, whom I had not noticed standing behind him. I thought at first that she must be his mother, because she had the same dark, sleek hair, but as I focused in on her, I saw from her lovely hair and her almond-shaped eyes that she was probably Asian. She was listening to Harlen with a remoteness that did not look at all motherly.
“Dream on and join the queue,” Gilly whispered into my ear.
I made a face at her, and we went on to our next class.
* * *
That afternoon I caught the bus home because it was raining hard. I soon bitterly regretted it because it was packed, and I spent the whole trip jammed too close to other people. I screened hard, of course, but the boy nearest me was horsing around with two others and I was scared his flailing, dirty hand would hit my bare skin.
By the time I got home, I was so wound up that I knew I wouldn’t be able to do my homework right away. I decided to make toasted sandwiches for dinner even though it wasn’t my night to cook. The activity worked the kinks out of me so that by the time Jesse came down, having smelled food, I felt calm and ready for conversation. But Jesse seemed totally distracted as he ate his sandwich, and the second he finished, he went up to his room again. I was still staring after him, wondering what the matter was, when Da came in the back door with Neil, Mel, and Tich. They didn’t stay either, but collected their sandwiches as I made them and trooped out to the shed. Mirandah came down and talked to Ricki on the phone while jiggling Luke in his bouncer. But when I’d finished cooking, she hung up and took Luke up to Mum, and then we carried our plates out to the front veranda.
It was a cool night, but the air smelled sweet and we ate while watching people go by. There were more walkers and joggers than usual, because everyone who had been cooped up all day on account of the rain was making use of the sliver of time before night set in.
Mrs. Frizzel from up the street wheeled past the gate, her fat little pug close by her heels. She nodded when she caught sight of us, and, curious, I focused my attention until I could just smell her vinegary odor. She looked disapproving, and I guessed she thought it was uncouth to eat on the veranda.
“The thing is,” Mirandah said suddenly, “if Da does become famous, it doesn’t have to mean all the things that being famous usually means. I mean, Da isn’t like other people who get famous and can’t handle it so they take drugs.”
“Da would never take drugs,” I said.
“That’s what I mean, you idiot,” she laughed. “I mean famous people go off the rails because there’s something about so many people watching them that messes them up. A lot of famous people kill themselves.”
“Is this from those dumb magazines you buy?” I snapped.
“I never buy dumb magazines,” she sai
d slyly. “I’m just saying that Da won’t go crazy if he gets famous, because it would just have happened to him by chance. He wasn’t trying to get famous. It’s the people who want fame that are in trouble.”
“You think wanting fame makes people insane?” I asked, trying to figure out her logic.
“I think the reason they want fame can make a person crazy. I mean, people want it because they feel insignificant. They want everyone to know them and be interested in them. They don’t realize that being stared at so much will turn them into actors in their own lives. Nothing will feel real anymore. They’ll feel less real when they’re famous than when they were nobody.”
“You think they kill themselves to make themselves feel real again?” I thought that was a surprisingly interesting conclusion for Mirandah. But she just rolled her eyes at me.
“I’m just saying some people can’t handle being looked at all the time. It’s not what they thought it was. But I think Da would be fine. He would still grow his own tomatoes.”
* * *
Tuesday was a blur of preparations for the looming school play. I hadn’t had much to do with it, first being in a coma for all that time and second being totally deficient in the area of artistic ability. But now that sets and costumes were being assembled and actors were working up to the dress rehearsal, anyone vaguely willing was co-opted as a gofer. I fetched and carried until the dismissal bell, then went to catch a bus. I was tired from all the running around, and I knew the bus wouldn’t be crowded because kids on a field trip that day had been dismissed early. I took a seat in the middle of the bus.
Just as the door hissed shut, an old man in a dirty suede coat reached it and knocked insistently. The bus driver hesitated, and I could tell he was thinking of ignoring the old guy. Then he relented, and the door swished open. The man got in, grumbling under his breath. The bus filled with the noxious reek of unwashed body, rancid food, alcohol, and old sweat. His hair looked like birds would reject it for a nest, unless birds have slums. The trousers and coat he wore were so greasy that they shone like waxed wood in patches at the knees and elbows, and when he sat down, I heard the faint crackle of newspapers that told me he had wrapped them around himself under his clothes. He sat a few seats in front of me but, suddenly, without any warning, he swung round and looked at me. I was wide open, not anticipating any attention, so the savage, sour reek of him leapt at me like a tiger. I was struggling to pull up my screen when the woman in the seat between us shifted. The old man’s baleful red gaze flickered to her, and with a gasp of relief, I switched my gaze to her, too. Because I was still wide open, her smell flowed at me next: musty old carpet mixed with some sort of sickly air freshener. She was not looking at me, though, so I was able to turn away.
I was shaken, because I had begun to think I had a good amount of control. But I had been careless to sit there on a bus with my senses unprotected, and I knew I must never do it again. What would have happened if he had gone on staring at me, and I had been unable to call up a screen? Maybe I would have gone on magnifying and swallowing information until I fell into another coma just to escape.
I shuddered, realizing that my confidence and self-control were an eggshell-thin crust over a giant void of ignorance. It was not enough just to be able to create a mathematical screen in my mind. I had to understand more about what had happened to me.
The bus passed a billboard advertising a circus and a small neon monkey waved its little black paw at me. It made me think of Wombat, with whom I definitely seemed to have established real communication. He sought me out now whenever he wanted anything, and a couple of times I had sensed he was trying to transmit something more complicated than his immediate needs.
I thought about animals and how they used their scents and body language. Maybe the old man and his unpleasant personal odor were an echo of the lion who used his urine to mark the borders of his kingdom, or the dog that peed contemptuously into the territory of another dog. Maybe the old man’s mind was so corrupted by alcohol that he had regressed into a state similar to his animal ancestors, so that consciously or unconsciously, he was using his odor to reject and lash out at other people. That brought me back to feeling that what had happened to my mind might simply be the accidental uncovering of something buried by evolution—something that might not be gone completely in us humans, even if it wasn’t being used consciously.
That afternoon when I got home, I stopped at the gate because there was an unfamiliar clacking sound coming from the house. It took a minute for me to recognize that it was the ancient typewriter Mum kept for typing stuff on cards to go with paintings at exhibitions. It’s so old Da keeps joking that it’s probably an antique and the most valuable thing in the whole house, but he can’t sell it to pay bills because Mum is a Luddite who refuses to use a computer. I grinned, walking up the path, because Mum hates naming paintings almost as much as she hates computers. She says when you name something, you pin it down like a butterfly; it doesn’t live anymore.
“Reality is elusive,” Mum told her agent Rhona once. I had liked the phrase so much that I wrote it on the front of my notebook.
I was half expecting to find Rhona inside waiting, because why else would Mum be up so early? But as I came down the hall, men’s voices were coming from the kitchen. I opened the door to find a stranger sitting at the table with Da. He was older and much bigger than Da, almost big enough to qualify as fat, only he wasn’t. He was solid under a slippery metallic-looking suit that accentuated a chest like a barrel. His bottom lip was very full, but his upper lip so thin as to be almost nonexistent. His face was hairless and cleanly pink, and his hair was a white meringue swirl. The hair was exaggerated and odd enough that it tweaked my memory. I realized that I had seen this man the night of the Urban Dingo gig. He had been talking to the snide announcer and the man in the green sneakers.
Da noticed me. “Aaron, this is my daughter.”
The big man turned so swiftly that I barely had time to strengthen my screen before his gaze was pinioning me. Even screening hard, I was shocked to feel something like a stream of tiny invisible fish surging at me from him. Only the fact that I had plenty of practice at not reacting to unexpected things in the past few weeks kept me from yelping as I felt the man’s attention nudge and push against me as if it were trying to get inside my skin.
He turned to Da and said oddly, “This is not Serenity.”
“No. Serenity is my youngest daughter. This is Alyzon. Honey, this is Aaron Rayc,” Da said. “He helps to manage Urban Dingo.”
“Just Aaron, please, and I do not manage the band. It is merely that I take an interest in them and perhaps I have been of some small use to them from time to time in offering advice.” He had a formal voice with just a hint of something rich and foreign. He smiled at me, and it was the sort of smile people give when they have been directed to notice you by someone whose opinion they care about. He had lost interest in me after learning that I was not Serenity, which made me wonder what Da had told him about her.
“The name is a version of Alison,” Da was explaining. “It was the name of my wife’s grandmother.”
I went over to the bench and began to make myself a mug of chocolate, because I was very curious about Aaron Rayc. When I was sure he and Da were paying no attention to me, I dropped my number screen.
I was looking at both men. I smelled the familiar coffee-grounds scent of Da mixed with tobacco and rope and a slight linseed odor. There was nothing from Aaron Rayc. Puzzled, I focused on him, leaving Da out of my vision. I smelled aftershave and deodorant, the very faint odor of sweat and mint toothpaste and a touch of garlic—but I could not smell what I had come to think of as an essence scent. Nor could I smell any of his thoughts or feelings. It was unnerving—like meeting someone who didn’t have a shadow.
I extended my other senses and saw that the pinkness of Aaron Rayc’s skin was actually a slight irritation, as if he had scrubbed himself too hard when he bathed. I listened to the thic
k, quick drub-drub of his heartbeat and the strong pull of his breathing and understood that the big man was excited and trying not to seem so.
“You say your wife is an artist?” he asked, and his voice boomed painfully. I winced and raised the screen.
Da’s face lit up the way it always did when he was talking about Mum. “Her name is Zambia Whitestarr. Maybe you’ve heard of her, if you’re a patron of the arts.” He refilled their teacups and got some more milk.
“I am interested in artists of many kinds,” Aaron Rayc said, following Da’s movements with his eyes. He had a voice like thickened cream, all smooth flow and rich blandness. No sign in it of the eagerness I could see in his body language.
“Those drawings are Zambia’s.” Da nodded to the wall by the door as he passed it. Aaron Rayc got up to look at them, and that was when I noticed the air around him was distorting the way it did around Da. I had the impression there was some difference, but it was hard to make it out against the busy background of the kitchen.
“Your wife’s work is very unusual,” Aaron Rayc said. “But I have to say that, in general, I am more drawn to mainstream art because it has a wider appeal. It is accessible and, as such, it is democratic. Much so-called high art and, if you will forgive me saying it, fringe art like your wife’s is too introverted. Very often its elevation owes itself to elitism; the desire to have a work of art that only some are able to understand inevitably sets up cultural haves and have-nots.”
As he spoke, he had a habit of lifting his big hands and waving them about elegantly to emphasize whatever point he was making, then dropping them suddenly and limply into his lap, as if they had fallen dead.
“Whew,” Da said. “What you’re saying sounds very much like you see art as a form of political expression.”
“Like anything creative, it is both a form of expression and a potential force. Think about it. Used properly, painting, music, writing—all of the arts—can be forces for change in society. Haven’t all the greatest musical artists changed the world? Elvis, the Beatles …”